MIND, BRAIN, AND PERSONALITY IN THE MODERN ERA
Lecturers: Dr Stephen Jacyna (s.jacyna@ucl.ac.uk; 020 7 679 8105)
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine
The course will be taught at 12 noon on Tuesday and 10am on Thursday in the
First Term
Assessment will be by one essay of 3,500-4,000 words to be submitted on Friday
12 December and by a three-hour examination. The essay and examination will
be equally weighted. Essays must be submitted in both hard copy and electronic
form together with a completed plagiarism declaration form. Essays submitted
after the deadline will be penalized at the rate of 5% per extra day unless an
extension has been agreed with the lecturer.
GENERAL TEXTS
Wayne Viney and D. Brett King, A History of Psychology: Ideas and Contexts
Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience
Lecture One: Introduction to the Course: Approaches to the History of
Psychology
Readings:
Wayne Viney and D. Brett King, A History of Psychology, pp. 1-37
Graham Richards, Mental Machinery, pp. 15-26
Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self, pp. 3-44
Lecture Two: Spirits and Passions in the Early-Modern Era
Readings:
Roger Smith, The Human Sciences, pp. 56-61
Robert L. Martensen, The Brain Takes Shape, pp. 47-71
George S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts, pp. 215-38
Lecture Three: The Rise of the Cerebral Body
Readings:
Robert G. Frank, “Thomas Willis and his circle: brain and mind in seventeenthcentury medicine,” in George Rousseau, The Languages of Psyche, pp. 107-46
Martensen, The Brain Takes Shape, pp. 75-91
Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh, pp. 169-87.
Lecture Four: Sensationalism: Locke
Readings:
Smith, The Human Sciences, pp. 157-83
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 159-76
E. J. Lowe, Locke on Human Understanding, pp. 1-22
C. Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians, pp. 7-24.
Lecture Five: Enlightenment Theories of the Mind
Readings:
Smith, The Human Sciences, pp. 215-59
Richard Olson, The Emergence of the Social Sciences, pp. 96-117
William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, pp. 173-210
Lecture Six: Eighteenth-Century Empiricism
Readings:
Graham Richards, “The absence of psychology in the eighteenth century,” Studies in
the History and Philosophy of Science, 1992, 23: 195-211
Graham Richards, Mental Machinery, pp. 144-50
Nicholas Phillipson, Hume, pp. 35-52
Paul Wood, “The natural history of man in the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of
Science, 1990, 28: 89-123
Robert G. Meyers, Understanding Empiricism: An Undergraduate Introduction to
Empiricism and the Empiricist Tradition in Philosophy, McGill University Press,
2006
Lecture Seven: Reid, Kant and the Reaction to Hume
Keith Lehrer, “Beyond impressions and ideas: Hume v. Reid,” in Peter Jones (ed.),
The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 108-23
Matthew Bell, The German Psychological Tradition of Psychology, pp. 143-66
P.B. Wood, “Hume, Reid and the science of mind,” in M.A. Stewart and John P.
Wright (eds), Hume and Hume’s Connexions, pp. 119-34
Lecture Eight: Romantic Psychology
Readings:
Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, pp. 173-210
Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind, pp. 39-65
Nigel Reeves, “Kleist’s Bedlam: abnormal psychology and psychiatry in the works of
Heinrich von Kleist,” in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, Romanticism and
the Sciences, pp. 280-92
Bell, German Psychological Tradition, pp. 167-207
Lecture Nine: Phrenology and Mesmerism
Readings:
Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 9-53
Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, pp. 101-33
Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, pp. 47-81
Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, pp. 32-59
Lecture Ten: Evolutionary Psychology
Readings:
L.S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology 1840-1940, pp. 32-55
Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man, pp. 175-242
Smith, Human Sciences, pp. 467-77
Lecture Eleven: The New Phrenology
Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, pp. 224-48
Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain, pp. 35-69
L.S. Jacyna, Lost Words, pp. 81-122
Lecture Twelve: Evolutionary Neurology
Readings:
Roger Smith, Inhibition, pp. 162-90
Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, pp. 150-96
Jacyna, Lost Words, pp. 123-45
Lecture Thirteen: Schools of Psychology in the Post-Civil War America
Readings
Smith, Human Sciences pp. 492-529.
Martin Halliwell, Romantic Science and the Experience of the Self: Transatlantic
Cross Currents from William James to Oliver Sacks, pp. 26-69
Eugene Taylor, William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 9-24, 24-39, 97-111
Lecture Fourteen: Nature versus Nurture: Measuring the Individual
Readings:
Taylor, William James on Consciousness, pp. 112-139
David Oldroyd, Darwinian Impacts: an Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution, pp.
282-297
David Joravsky, “The Impossible Project of Ivan Pavlov (and William James and
Sigmund Freud),” Science in Context , 1992, 5: 265-280
Lecture Fifteen: Russian Psychology: Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and the Science of
the Brain
Readings:
David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: a Critical History, pp. 3-26, and pp. 203-219
Daniel P Todes, Pavlov’s Physiological Factory: Experiment, Interpretation,
Laboratory, Enterprise, pp. 3-118.
Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, pp. 636-700
Lecture Sixteen: American Behaviorism
Readings:
Kerry Buckley, Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of
Behaviorism, pp. 73-98
Ben Harris, “‘Give me a dozen healthy infants’: John B Watson’s popular advice on
childrearing, women, and the family” in In the Shadow of the Past: Psychology
Portrays the Sexes: a Social and Intellectual history, pp. 126-154.
Lawrence D Smith and William R Woodward, B F Skinner and Behaviorism in
American Culture, pp. 109-127 and pp. 128-150
Lecture Seventeen: Gestalt Psychology
Readings:
Mitchell Ashe, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967: Holism and the
Quest for Objectivity, pp. 17-84.
Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of
Dynamic Psychiatry pp. 418-570 and pp. 657-748.
Lecture Eighteen: The Rise of the Unconscious
Readings:
Sonu Shamdasani, “The Psychoanalytic Body”, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone
(eds), Medicine in the 20th Century, pp. 307-322
Anthony Clare, “Freud’s Cases: The Clinical Basis of Psychoanalysis,” in Bynum and
Porter (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, pp. 271288
Smith, Human Sciences, pp. 701-745
Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, pp. 418-570 and pp. 657-748
Lecture Nineteen: Neurological Holism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Readings:
Anne Harrington, “Other ‘ways of knowing’: the politics of knowledge in interwar
German brain science,” in Harrington (ed.), So Human a Brain: Knowledge and
Values in the Neurosciences, pp. 229-44
L.S. Jacyna, “Starting anew: Henry Head’s contribution to aphasia studies,” Journal
of Neurolinguistics, 18: 2005, 327-336
Jacyna, Lost Words, pp. 146-70.
Lecture Twenty: Conclusion and Revision